Pioneering new ideas of life and health in the 21st Century. The flagship publication for the most innovative and authoritative writer/speaker/instructor on Understanding Conditioning. While he started out like all his friends wondering how to make exercise harder, his breakthrough idea was making exercise as easy as possible -- and therefore inevitable and unavoidable -- as the only effective lifelong strategy for those activities.

Thursday, November 24, 2011

Conformity (Consensus) Is Not Reality

No matter how many "experts" they get to repeat it, conformity of opinion, is not the same as reality.

In the previous age of mass media, that was what was important -- to get everybody repeating the same thing, as though that was enough to make it so -- even if the results in reality, could not be verified, but people were advised they needed to believe harder, and do it even more. That used to be the only game in town -- and so those who could buy up all the mass media, propagated their world view, as though that was true, because that was the only thing people ever saw, and even the freelance writers were paid to confirm.

Writers don't get paid for writing the truth; they get paid for writing what somebody else wants them to write -- as though it were the truth, and how they got to that point, was the tricks of the trade in convincing people of what they wanted them to believe. This is especially true of law and politics -- that whoever is most successful at propagating (propaganda) their truth, controls the offices and institutions.

That's been true the whole history of civilization -- as Plato noted in Socrates' dialogue -- on the difference between reality, and the shadow on the wall -- most people mistook for reality. The shadows were the manipulations to convince one that the "appearance" was the actuality -- which is the beginning of the divergence of thought from the reality -- which is not simply an opinion, and who can control opinion most completely and ruthlessly.

And that is why although more people than ever before try to attain and maintain their optimal health and condition, fewer than ever before actually achieve it -- because they simply have the wrong understanding of what it takes to achieve that, and not that people have to believe harder, and spend more time and effort achieving it. No amount of effort with the wrong understanding, is going to allow one to achieve the same results of having the right understanding -- with very little effort and resistance.

That is true with everything in life -- especially and particularly true of conditioning to attain and maintain one's optimal shape and conditioning. No amount of only working the heart harder and faster, is going to cause all the other muscles of the body, to actualize their best condition and shape. One has to actually effect and articulate those possibilities with the muscles one actually wants to shape in that manner -- and nothing else is possible!

But one doesn't have to do 600-800 specialized exercises (movements) to work all the different muscles of the body -- if one understands that effecting movement (contraction) from the furthest extremity (insertion) at the head, hands and feet, requires the engagement of all the supporting (connected) muscles back to the point of muscular origin of the muscular structures back at the heart -- which is conveniently designed and evolved by nature as the greatest efficiency of purpose, form and function.

In realizing this, the heart is not the lack of functioning in the (human) body, but rather, the lack of the skeletal (voluntary) muscles, in pushing blood back towards the heart -- which is why exercise (movement), produces a healthful effect. But simply working the heart harder, is the major reason most people don't want to exercise -- in this conventionally prescribed manner, and even if they persist, achieve minimally satisfying results to persist as a lifelong, nearly effortless, rational practice.